


And You'll Be Smiling

by indevan



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Drug Use, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-08
Updated: 2020-01-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:01:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22167541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indevan/pseuds/indevan
Summary: Dimitri hated it, but he had no choice.  He didn’t think there was anything else for him.  He was ostensibly still in school, chasing a degree he might never finish, but he had taken the spring semester off and now the summer, too.  He was here, suspended in the hot, still air.  Most days he spent holed up in his room, not doing much
Relationships: Ashe Duran | Ashe Ubert/Dedue Molinaro, Minor or Background Relationship(s), Past Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Dedue Molinaro - Relationship
Comments: 2
Kudos: 33





	And You'll Be Smiling

**Author's Note:**

> sometimes you just write something that would super please your sixteen-year-old self. so dimitri introspection/au fic inspired by/set to "captain jack" by billy joel because it's 2020 and we're out here

He felt like he was going nowhere. He was on his back with his wheels in the air, spinning and spinning, but accomplishing nothing. Dimitri closed his eyes. His eyelids were sweaty. Everything was sweaty. It was that time of year where the heat was so heavy and wet that he felt like he could almost touch it. He sweat in the worst places: the bend of his arm, the back of his knees, and now the skin of his eyelids. His home was a measure of extremes. In the cold, it would bitter to the bone and he would have to wear two pairs of socks at least. Right now, though, it was a sleepy heat that smelled like grilled meat and gasoline.

Dimitri hated it, but he had no choice. He didn’t think there was anything else for him. He was ostensibly still in school, chasing a degree he might never finish, but he had taken the spring semester off and now the summer, too. He was here, suspended in the hot, still air. Most days he spent holed up in his room, not doing much.

Other nights he went into the city, catching a bus because he didn’t drive anymore. Usually, he went alone, but sometimes with others. He felt more real, then, like an actual person and not a ghost, blurry around the edges and not touching those around him. He would ride in Sylvain’s black, vintage Thunderbird with the top down, the wind lifting his sweaty hair off of the back of his neck. It felt like he was riding in the night itself as it streaked down the highway, well above the speed limit. Tonight, though, he was by himself. The bus let him off at the covered stop, the lampost above flickering. Downtown wasn’t good this time of night, but somehow Dimitri felt invincible in a way. Without anyone else there, without anyone but his own thoughts, he felt unreal. No one could touch him, because he didn’t exist.

When he came with Sylvain, he would let him drag him into the sex shops.

“I could do that,” Sylvain would say, pointing at the half-naked men on the magazine covers. “Wouldn’t that freak my dad out?”

Sylvain was dangerous like that. Dimitri worried about him, but he didn’t know how to bring it up and. He was one to talk. Here he was wandering the streets alone, because he could. Because it was something to do.

Felix never came with him anymore. Not unless someone else was there. There was a time they were inseparable, sometimes even finishing each other’s sentences, but not anymore. Dimitri had been sleeping over his house when they found out his brother had crashed his motorcycle. He had seen Felix throw his head back and scream and he knew he never wanted Dimitri or anyone to see him like that. After that and after...other things, he all but avoided him completely. He only came if Sylvain would go and stare too long at the straining, perfect muscles on the magazines.

The streets weren’t crowded, but they weren’t empty either. Dimitri was a part of it and apart from it at once. People moved by him, some turning their head his way but not lingering. Without anyone to draw him to one place or another, he had no destination. He was unfettered. A man stood at the end of the corner and cocked his head to the side.

Dimitri smiled.

\--

His sister was home for the summer, too. She hadn’t taken “a bit of a break” as his stepmother said about him. She was in line to graduate on time. Edelgard didn’t even have to take summer classes.

Tonight, he didn’t know if she knew he was here. Their parents were out of the house. Neither of them were supposed to leave (as if they were children, still), but that never stopped them.

“You should come out tonight,” she had said earlier, but now she probably thought he had already left because he told her that he was leaving to get out of going.

He had seen her in her platform boots to make her seem at all taller than her barely five-two stature and her black dress. She had opened the door to her girlfriend earlier. From his room, Dimitri had heard the  _ mwah mwah _ kissing sounds and then the sound of bottles of beer being opened. He didn’t want to crash her date, even if she said they were meeting her other friends at the club. He didn’t want to go to the goth club either. It was dark and the strobes gave him a headache. The drone of the music: discordant keyboards and heavy instrumentals. It was too much.

He knew downstairs Edelgard and Dorothea were putting their bottles in the recycling bin and running out across the darkened lawn where someone waited in a car to drive them to the club. He had been in that position as well, crawling from his window into Sylvain’s car or, earlier, clinging to Glenn’s back as he shot down the street, untouchable until he wasn’t.

He waited until he heard the sound of the car pull away, until he was alone, to begin to stroke himself in the dark. It was a fruitless endeavor, just like going downtown by himself. It wouldn’t do anything except make his wrists hurt and his sheets sticky. He pictured himself on his own date, running across the lawn into Dedue’s arms and kissing him before getting in the passenger seat of his car. Holding his hand where it rested on the clutch.

But that was done. Dimitri had broken it off the semester before he had “a bit of a freak out” (another term from his stepmother, who only spoke in bits and pieces, when Dimitri had felt like whole chunks had been torn from him). He had felt himself falling too hard and fast and so he put a stop to it. It was what the therapist his father made him go to after he was sent home for talking to himself in homeroom would tell him to do. He felt everything too fiercely, too strongly, and it was up to him to regulate it. He put too much on Dedue and ended it before he could hurt him. Or hurt himself.

Now he was dating their friend Ashe and he saw them at house parties sometimes. Dedue was never a party person and neither was Dimitri unless Sylvain bullied them both to go. He went to parties willingly now because there wasn’t anything else to do and it was easier not to think if he had a drink in his hand, but before he rarely did. And he would see Dedue with his arms draped casually around Ashe’s waist and bent over nearly in half so he could rest his chin on the top of his head. They would sway together to the beat of the music playing on the stereo or turntable, perfectly in rhythm.

As he rubbed at himself furiously, he pictured himself back in his arms. Dimitri would turn and kiss him and the memories surged, then. His fantasy grew deeper as he remembered moments on his bed as a tangle of limbs, hands searching, lips touching, breathing heavy. Being held afterwards.

Dimitri felt himself growing closer as the images sped up. Useless, useless images of what he would never have again. Of loving and being loved. He had ruined it.

The house phone rang somewhere in the house and Dimitri felt something in him shatter. He retracted his hand and got to his feet. He had a feeling it was for him.

\--

It was rare these days that all four of them were together. There was always a bit of a hole with Glenn gone. They were four now and not five. Dimitri pictured him sometimes still, how he would fit in with them if he had grown up alongside them. If he and Ingrid would be married like she used to write in her notebook with the flocked horses on the cover. Ingrid Fraldarius with hearts to dot the I’s.

Ingrid never went downtown with them, because she had sense and because the leather accessories in the sex shops made her blush. She worked in addition to taking a full semester load in both halves of the summer. She wanted to graduate in August and get it done with. Dimitri couldn’t blame her. His own future was foggy and uncertain, with graduating from school seeming less and less attainable.

The park was where they always went, from when they were children. The playground equipment was falling apart and rusted now, but Dimitri still treasured it. This park was where things made sense. Sylvain straddled a snail on a spring, rocking back and forth with his heels. He was smoking furiously, lighting the next cigarette with the still smoldering end of the last.

“Don’t do that here,” Ingrid said. “I hate when you smoke.”

“Me too,” Felix said. Dimitri noted, as he said this, that there was an unlit cigarette tucked behind his own ear. Maybe it was Sylvain’s. He never knew if they were or weren’t together at any given time, but he had surrendered the right to know anything about Felix’s romantic life a long time ago.

He reckoned they were together, because Felix only smoked when he was with Sylvain. Cigarettes, at least. When things were good, at parties, Felix would spin like a top with pinwheels in his eyes, six drinks in and bragging about how he hadn’t gotten any sleep in a week because Sylvain was keeping him up. He never said anything about it sober, though, except Dimitri would see them surreptitiously holding hands or Sylvain burying his nose in Felix’s hair when they thought no one was looking.

“You just don’t like it because you say it makes my mouth taste bad,” Sylvain said.

“It’s true. It makes your tongue tastes like ash.”

Confirmation. They were together. Sylvain rocked back hard on the snail and shot forward, kicking up dirt as he did.

“With or without the ‘e?’”

“How would he know what Ashe tastes like?” Ingrid asked.

“I was making a joke.”

To that, she rolled her eyes to put an end to the conversation. Dimitri looked past them, to the metal playground that sizzled under the sun. When he was small, he didn’t heed the heat and would grab onto the metal rungs with his bare hands. He would cry out and fall back into someone’s--Glenn’s, his father’s--waiting arms and then immediately try again.

He stretched his arms out and Sylvain snagged his wrist. He turned his hand palm up and looked at the flesh on the inside of Dimitri’s arm.

“Sick bruises,” he said.

Too hot for long sleeves. He jerked his arm, grateful for his unnatural strength--not weakened in the face of this heat, in the face of what he’s done--to free himself.

Ingrid looked concerned but she didn’t say anything. She never said the right thing the first time. Or the second time, usually. Felix glared and looked away, jutting his chin up towards the cloudless, bleached out sky. He maybe would have said something once. Dimitri looked at him, almost wanting him to. It was easier than Sylvain’s suspicious gaze.

Dimitri cradled his arm to his chest and said no more.

\--

He was alone again downtown, dangerous though it was. Neon blurred around him, mixing with the haze of pollution in the sky. Dimitri felt invincible, cushioned from the world around him. He was a ghost, intangible. Momentary.

He was in a sex shop, looking at the magazines. He wasn’t really turned on or wanting to be here, but it was a place he knew. It felt a bit weird being here without Sylvain to point at the magazines or the leashes and toys on the wall.

The magazines were on a rack attached to the wall, face out. He stared at the model in one, vision blurring, until he  _ was _ Sylvain. Sylvain shirtless and reaching back to grasp the pole behind him, his other hand tugging down the waistband of his briefs. A cowboy hat on his head and his back arched. Another magazine cover, this one black and white, became Felix in leather, staring out with a look that was both disgruntled and indifferent. Legs spread with a hand resting on his inner thigh.

_ I could do that… _

Sylvain’s voice echoed in his head. Felix staring too hard and too long at the covers before changing a look at Sylvain, awkward when they weren’t together and coy when they were. He looked at the Felix on the cover and a memory broke through the cushioned cocoon of his mind. After Glenn’s funeral, going to Felix’s room to see how he was holding up. Felix curled up on the bed, angry, so angry. Dimitri lifting his face.

A third magazine featured two men in an embrace. Dedue and Ashe. Ashe staring up at Dedue in profile, Dedue lifting his thigh up over his hip in an exaggerated pose. Ashe with his thin, tapered neck and his eyes like sea glass. Breakable. But stronger than Dimitri. He wouldn’t break Dedue’s heart like he did. That moment as they packed up the dorm, Dimitri looking into Dedue’s eyes--if Ashe’s were sea glass, then Dedue’s were the sea itself--looking so hard he could see reflections of himself in them. Telling him he had to end it.

“You alright, kid?”

The cashier’s voice was far away. Dimitri stumbled back, in a daze.

“You on something?”

He was right to next to him, but seemed miles away. He swallowed against a dry throat and shook his head. Left the store. He probably should go home. Try to navigate the bus with its shock of light and then plunge into darkness. His mind felt like it was peeling back like a flower. An iris. His mind was the iris in his eye. The bad one. The one that kept him from driving anymore.

He found the covered stop to wait for the bus. Under the buzzing light, he was unfettered again. He was nothing.

\--

Sometimes Dimitri thought about taking a trip. Listening to music with the wind in his hair, but. He couldn’t drive anymore. Not when he was legally blind in one eye. Not that he liked driving before. All that power beneath him. The rumbling engine. The wheel vibrating between his palms. He still thought of Glenn, that night, riding on his motorcycle. He wondered what he thought when he crashed. If he had time to think of anything at all.

There was no reason for him to go away. He would be himself, just somewhere else.

He would still have to face what was happening.

He had been over at Sylvain’s. His father was out at a party at Dimitri’s house and his mother was dead to the world and, even if she wasn’t, the house was so big that she wouldn’t hear them. The four of them put Sylvain’s old goth albums he got at flea markets on his turntable and slid around the polished wood floors in their socks just as they had as children. Dimitri felt almost normal, gliding from room to room. Felix had on Sylvain’s lime green sunglasses and he looked very nearly carefree. He was drunk on the red wine Mr. Gautier kept deep in the pantry as if Sylvain didn’t know every single one of his liquor hiding places. He had been stealing pills and booze from his parents since he was fourteen. Dimitri, giddy himself, thought he could maybe almost touch him. The way they used to. Linking their fingers or tugging on each other’s hair. But even he wasn’t so far gone that he would risk ruining it.

“Dima,” Sylvain had said. “Do you have any of that good shit?”

“What?”

“C’mon.” His eyes, patinated bronze, flashed.

Dimitri had seen Ingrid touch the inside of her arm. Hers wasn’t bruised. He had stared at her skin.

“I don’t do it often enough to have any on hand,” he had said back.

Sylvain had accepted it and then broke into a grin, catching Felix around the middle and spinning him about. Wine flew from his goblet onto the floor, but no one mopped it up. That was the future. In the present, Felix, flushed and drunk, actually laughed and tipped his head back so Sylvain could ravish his neck with kisses. Ingrid dropped her hand and laughed, her unvocalized concern for Dimitri dropped along with it.

He had left in good spirits, leaving as the sky was lavender bright. It was already hot, though, and he was sweating by the time he turned the corner to his street. Sweat trickling under his patch and down his back.

On his street, there was an ambulance, its siren echoing into the empty street. The sound was metallic and hollow. Dimitri put his hands over his ears. He grew closer and saw that it was in front of his house. His first thought went to Edelgard. She had been sick before their parents got married. The doctors had found something deep in her spine and his stepmother always worried the surgery they had performed when she was a child had gone wrong. His mind was hazy and he stumbled forward. Dimitri felt like he was in a movie. Everything was overexposed and bright in the unyielding light of morning. Paramedics, a woman somewhere crying. Dimitri stood on the lawn, unmoving.

A black, antique Bomb car pulled up on the opposite side of the street. The sound of the brakes squealing made Dimitri turn his head. Edelgard burst out of the backseat. Her eyeliner was smudged and her hair smelled like the clove cigarettes she and her friends smoked.

“Dimitri, what happened?” she asked. “Mom called me at Dorothea’s. She was freaking out.”

“I just got here,” he made his mouth say.

Edelgard turned and waved the car on. Through the window, Dimitri thought he might have seen her friend Hubert driving.

The ambulance’s doors were shut and the paramedics were getting in. They drove off, siren wailing, leaving the two of them with no answers. From the house staggered his stepmother. She was in an evening dress, a remnant from last night.

There were no other cars. The party was long over. Dimitri had hid in Sylvain’s room when they heard his father come home. How Sylvain then kicked him and Ingrid so he and Felix could fuck. He had walked Ingrid to her bus stop because she lived in a different neighborhood and then he had gone home. To this.

His stepmother’s hair, probably once immaculately styled, was lopsided and hanging half down. Edelgard ran to her and took her by her shoulders. With her big, black boots, she was nearly as tall as her.

“Mom, what happened? Why was the ambulance here?”

“Lambert…” she got out and then dissolved into sobs.

\--

Sylvain listed famous people who died by drowning. He was weird about death like that. He used to collect newspaper clippings of disasters and keep them in a shoebox under his bed. Dimitri ran the names over in his head.

_ Natalie Wood...Brian Jones...Virginia Woolf...Jeff Buckley...Lambert Blaiddyd _

Dimitri reaching up to the too hot playground and falling back to land in his father’s arms or Glenn’s arms. Someone there to catch him. Glenn, roaring down the street in his motorcycle. His father, floating facedown in their swimming pool. At the funeral, his stepmother had grabbed him and said, “Don’t you leave me, too, Dimitri. Don’t you ever leave me.” He figured that he wasn’t going to go back to school at summer’s end.

The last funeral he had been to was Glenn’s and it wasn’t any easier. Felix curled on his bed, glaring at Dimitri and then softening, just for a moment. He sat by his father at this funeral, his eyes hidden behind Sylvain’s sunglasses. Impenetrable.

Dedue came the funeral, and so did Ashe. It was thoughtful and he didn’t have to, but he was there.

Later, Dimitri holed himself up in his room, because it was all he had. Leaving Dedue. His breakdown. The way the moments of ease and normalness with his friends seemed more and more fleeting. Edelgard’s life and his own lack thereof. His father’s death. Dimitri closed his eyes. Bit his lip. Let himself drift. It was only an occasional reprieve, but it left him smiling.


End file.
